The Psychiatrist Who Pleaded Insanity

THE PSYCHIATRIST HAD CALLED UP HIS golfing buddy, the police chief, to ask for a meeting and his help. When the two got together, the chief listened carefully to the psychiatrist's highly unusual request, tried to talk him out of it, then finally agreed to send one of his men who was good, he said, at taking care of "special favors."

On a Monday morning, Ken Rosario, a plainclothes detective, showed up in the office of the psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Gilbert. Sitting across from Gilbert, a trim man with wavy, salt-and-pepper hair and a deep tan who looked a decade younger than his 74 years, Rosario ran his eye over what appeared to be an acre of diplomas and framed pictures of athletes -- testimony to a distinguished career that spanned three decades. Best-known for his work in forensic psychiatry, Gilbert had testified at hundreds of murder trials as an expert in the insanity defense. He'd leaped to national prominence in the late 70's by advancing the theory, in the famous trial of a teen-age killer named Ronny Zamora, that the defendant suffered from "television intoxication."

Since setting up his practice in the mid-1950's, Gilbert had conducted hundreds of court-ordered evaluations of prisoners in Dade County jails. "Back in the good old days," he told Detective Rosario, "I did a lot of work for the police departments down here, a hell of a lot of work, and they all owed me favors."

The psychiatrist told the detective why he needed to call in one of those favors now. He'd decided to intercede in a child custody case, he said, involving a young boy who was being abused by his father. His voice rising with indignation, Gilbert said the father was a lawyer named Arthur Spiegel -- "real slick" but "kinky."

The psychiatrist said he wanted the father "put on the hot seat." This was the special favor he'd requested during the meeting with his friend, the police chief. Gilbert had known the chief, Dale Bowlin, an assistant director of the Metro-Dade Police Department, since 1989, when Bowlin came to him as a patient seeking treatment for headaches caused by a golf-cart accident.

When Gilbert first broached the idea of going after the father, a somewhat stunned Bowlin tried to dissuade his friend. But the psychiatrist persisted. Gilbert asked Bowlin to help him hire a hit man to knock off the father. But now, with the detective listening intently, the psychiatrist backed down. He wanted to see the lawyer "put out of business," he said with a nervous laugh. "But then again I don't want to get into the heavy stuff."

Instead, he asked Rosario to set up the father on a drug charge. "All we've got to do is show he's a possessor," Gilbert said. "What is the significant amount where it becomes a felony, not a misdemeanor?"

Rosario thought for a moment. "Depends on what drug you're talking about," he said.

"Well, let's say cocaine."

"Maybe a kilo of cocaine. It depends."

"Well, of course, I'd like to see him in jail, but I'm trying to be practical," the psychiatrist said helpfully.

Rosario would be the bag man, the link between Gilbert and Bowlin. For arranging the frame-up, the psychiatrist had promised the police chief all the "golf balls" he would ever need. Now Gilbert told Rosario, "Just give me an idea of what I should have in the way of golf balls."

"Dale Bowlin likes to golf a lot," Rosario said, "so I guess 5,000, uh, golf balls, will keep him in a good state of mind."

"Five thousand!" exclaimed Gilbert. "He could put a lot in the water for that."

Rosario agreed. Then, with a chuckle, he added, "You know we do not accept checks."

"No," Gilbert said, keeping the joke alive, "these'll be golf balls I found in the pond."

"Good, good, good," the detective said. "As long as they're nontraceable, I have no problems."

The next day, Aug. 28, 1990, Gilbert drove his gray BMW 535i to an arranged meeting in a bank parking lot and opened the passenger door to admit Rosario. As he did, a video camera in an unmarked police van secretly recorded the scene. Ever since Gilbert solicited Bowlin, the police had been onto him. They'd sent Rosario to his office wearing a wireless transmitter to record the entire 40-minute conversation.

In the front seat of the BMW, the psychiatrist handed the detective a $2,000 down payment. The money was in a Top-Flite golf ball box -- Gilbert's little joke. Rosario carefully counted it. In the next instant, officers with drawn guns swooped down and arrested Michael Gilbert for bribing police officers to make a false arrest and, based on the meeting with Bowlin, cause bodily harm.

HE WAS ARRAIGNED IN the very Miami courthouse where he'd regularly testified for $150 an hour, taking the stand to conduct dazzling, intricate journeys into the criminal mind. Since Gilbert's specialty was the insanity defense, perhaps it was no surprise that when he himself was indicted, he pleaded that he, too, was criminally insane. He claimed that during the weeklong period when he'd met with the police and raised money for the bribe, he had suffered "an acute psychotic break."

To many, the psychiatrist must have been crazy to break the law so flagrantly after a lifetime of respectability, prosperity and the good life, Miami style. Gilbert was a millionaire socialite who over the years had developed ties to some of the city's most prominent real-estate developers and cultural leaders. Among his many talents, he played the violin and the viola, and had a near photographic memory that stored 200 telephone numbers. A twice-divorced bachelor, the septuagenarian psychiatrist tickled courthouse colleagues by inviting pretty lawyers to conferences at his home, and by showing up at singles' nights in downtown hotels. If Gilbert had an identifiable Achilles' heel, it was his fondness for strikingly attractive, much younger women.

Following his indictment last September, Gilbert checked into a mental hospital, complaining of "burnout." He hired fellow forensic psychotherapists to examine him. Soon he found three prepared to testify that at the time of his meeting with Rosario, he indeed met the test of criminal insanity.

Was Michael Gilbert crazy? Had advancing age and deteriorating judgment led him into delusion and paranoia, as his experts stood ready to state? Or was he, as the prosecution claimed, malingering? Intentionally distorting symptoms? Using his mastery of the insanity defense to fake insanity?

ABOUT THE ERUDITION and brilliance of Michael Gilbert, nearly everyone who knew him agreed. He was a psychologist as well as a psychiatrist, with a Ph.D. and an M.D. from the University of Michigan. During the Korean War the Army gave him top-secret clearance as an expert in enemy brainwashing.

Gilbert's name became nationally known after he took the stand in the high-profile 1969 murder trial of Jack (Murph the Surf) Murphy, the former surfing champion who stole the Star of India sapphire from the American Museum of Natural History. Despite Gilbert's judgment that Murphy was legally insane, the jury returned a guilty verdict.

Gilbert soon became known for his original and highly creative diagnoses of criminal conduct. Although courts have recognized mental deficiency as grounds for acquittal since at least the 16th century, Gilbert tried to expand the boundaries of what could be considered insane behavior. In the witness box, he proclaimed that delusions of grandeur drove embezzlers, that murdering teen-agers were acting out episodes of "Kojak." To hard-boiled prosecutors, he was either a flimflam man or a liberal headshrinker bending over backward to rationalize heinous crimes. But to defense lawyers, who often fell back on the insanity defense as a last resort, Gilbert was a godsend who helped win acquittals. They said he was a man ahead of his time, a psychiatrist whose insights could not yet be appreciated.

In the 1977 Zamora case, Gilbert proposed that years of watching television had left the teen-age defendant unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. According to his sworn confession, Zamora had broken into a neighbor's home and gunned her down, then fled to Disney World. The trial was a sensation, in part because it was one of the first in which television cameras were allowed in an American courtroom. Zamora was convicted, but the TV-intoxication defense entered the law books.

No other defense stirs so much public interest as insanity. Yet the claim is made in less than 1 percent of all criminal trials. Very few result in acquittals by reason of insanity. When one does, it can ignite public outrage, as happened after the 1982 acquittal of John W. Hinckley Jr. in the shooting of Ronald Reagan. Disgust with the Hinckley verdict led to an era of more restrictive insanity standards in Federal courts and many state ones.

"Jurors tend to dismiss the insanity defense," says Leonard Haber, a Miami forensic psychologist. "It has to be so apparent that the average person almost doesn't need an expert."

Paradoxically, Gilbert's intense cerebration was also his greatest weakness, since the more esoteric the diagnosis, the less likely a jury is to accept it. His cultivation gave him a superior air, which sometimes rubbed juries the wrong way.

Recalls Ellis S. Rubin, the defense lawyer in the Zamora case: "While I was rehearsing him, I realized that if you opened up a dictionary to the word 'arrogance,' you would see a picture of Mike Gilbert. He talked down. He was above it all. He assumed everybody understood his convoluted reasoning."

OUTSIDE THE courtroom, Gilbert led the life of a swinger. His home on Biscayne Bay rang with the merriment of partygoers. Investing in real estate and other businesses, he built a fortune once estimated at $4.4 million. He joined three country clubs: Westview, the Jockey Club and the Cricket Club, on whose dance floor he could sometimes be found discoing with his young and beautiful second wife.

After fathering three daughters, Gilbert had divorced his first wife, June, and in 1971, at age 55, he married a woman named Sandra, a 29-year-old Juilliard graduate who'd become a model and dancer. He gave her a white Rolls-Royce and a $1,000-a-month clothing allowance.

By the late 80's, however, the marriage foundered. Sandra sued for divorce, charging in a rancorous fight that Gilbert was concealing his wealth by transferring property to his daughters and to a close friend, Rebecca Thacker, a stunning woman with a big head of red hair.

In divorce papers, the psychiatrist counterclaimed that his wife had once called the management of a hotel where Thacker was staying and accused her of being a prostitute.

It's no surprise that Sandra Gilbert felt threatened by Rebecca Thacker, who had met Gilbert 20 years before and had recently renewed their acquaintance. Here was a woman very much in her own mold -- statuesque, elegantly coiffed and tailored and some 30 years younger than Michael Gilbert.

Becky Thacker, as she was known, drew a cloak of mystery around herself. She spoke of residences in Hawaii, London and Baton Rouge, La.; in Miami, she stayed at first-class hotels and traveled by stretch limousine -- but it was never clear if she or an admirer was footing the bill.

By far the most mysterious thing about Becky Thacker was the stories of her political connections. In 1989, she'd introduced Gilbert to her friend Cecil Heftel, a former United States Representative from Hawaii who'd made an unsuccessful run for governor in 1986. Thacker also told Gilbert she was friends with another politican -- the former Presidential candidate Gary Hart. She let people believe she had consulted Hart on his hair style and television image, and even helped write his speeches. (Hart says he has "no information about this person.")

Amid the uncertainty over Thacker, one thing was clear: Michael Gilbert was head-over-heels in love with her. He boasted that Thacker was his girlfriend, even his fiancee. Later these claims turned out to be exaggerations -- there appeared to be no intimate relationship -- but Thacker did little to discourage the wishful thinking of the much older man. In public she held his hand and allowed him to slip his arm around her.

In September 1989, a public defender paid a curious visit to Gilbert, recently divorced and living in an apartment on a country club golf course. The lawyer was meeting the psychiatrist to prepare him for a coming murder trial. But Gilbert kept steering the conversation back to Thacker. "He really couldn't keep going more than five minutes on the facts of the case," recalls the lawyer, Edith Georgi. "He just wanted to talk about Becky." Georgi worried that Gilbert was too preoccupied to concentrate on her murder case. "He was," she concluded, "clearly obsessed."

IN ALL THE LITERATURE about femmes fatales , in all the great Hollwood movies, it is never the woman alone who lures the man to his doom. In the classic "Double Indemnity," the deliciously corrupt Barbara Stanwyck ensnares Fred MacMurray in a plot to murder her husband. But Stanwyck does not cause MacMurray's fall entirely on her own. The evil germinates through a combination of her seductiveness and his willingness to be seduced.

A man in the grip of an obsession with a tantalizing and perhaps unattainable woman is a man who would go far to impress her. As it happened, Becky Thacker had a personal problem for which she ardently sought the help of Michael Gilbert. It had to do with Thacker's younger sister, Elizabeth Spiegel, who was recently divorced from Arthur Spiegel, a lawyer in the Miami public defender's office. The couple was engaged in a down-and-dirty custody battle over their only child, Adam.

In July 1990, Mrs. Spiegel picked up 3-year-old Adam from a visit with his father and said she had found the child "groggy and limp." After an emotional telephone call to Gilbert at home on a Friday night, she followed his advice to contact her pediatrician and took her son to Miami Children's Hospital. There she made an incendiary accusation: that Adam had been abused by his father.

The hospital ordered a medical examination and reported the mother's charge to state authorities. Arthur Spiegel vehemently denied the charge.

Later investigations cast considerable doubt on Mrs. Spiegel's accusation. The Florida Department of Health and Resource Services found no evidence of abuse. Miami Children's Hospital concluded that Adam's grogginess was a result of medication his father had given him for a cold.

But Mrs. Spiegel and Becky Thacker were not about to let the matter rest. Thacker, who was financially underwriting her sister, hired a private eye to tail Arthur Spiegel, according to trial records. All through August of last year, as the case of Spiegel v. Spiegel moved toward a climactic court date, the globe-trotting Thacker encamped in the Coral Gables Hyatt Regency, where she was occasionally joined for overnight stays by Mrs. Spiegel. During this period, the sisters were in constant contact with Gilbert, phoning his home and office more than 120 times. On Aug. 23, Gilbert made the call to Dale Bowlin and asked him to drop by his office.

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THE NEXT MORNING, Bowlin took part in a long and remarkable conversation, which he reconstructed later that day in a detailed report. Among other things, Gilbert revealed how trapped he was in Becky Thacker's web; he also showed that he'd lost none of his trademark arrogance. He acted as if being an insider in the legal system entitled him to go outside the law. The psychiatrist proclaimed that he was on "a higher plane as far as intelligence than other people."

Bringing up Arthur Spiegel, Gilbert said: "This is where things get sticky. I'd like you to do this for me -- get some of your men to plant some dope on this jerk."

A surprised Bowlin looked hard at Gilbert and told him flatly that he was out of line: what he was talking about was criminal activity .

The psychiatrist persisted. He told Bowlin that his rich "fiancee," Becky Thacker, was deeply concerned about her sister's custody fight. Thacker, Gilbert told Bowlin, was in a position to reward the police chief substantially. Did Bowlin understand what he was talking about?

"I assured him that I knew exactly what he meant but I wasn't interested," Bowlin later wrote.

At this point, Gilbert's statements took a turn that would later be crucial to his insanity defense. The psychiatrist told Bowlin that Thacker had gotten into trouble with powerful officials of the Democratic Party with her financial support of George Bush in 1988. Democratic officials were taking their revenge on Thacker, Gilbert contended, by helping Arthur Spiegel with his custody bid. As proof, the psychiatrist offered tales of strange men spying on Thacker. Once when he and Thacker were dining out, Gilbert said, they had noticed a man recording their conversation with a Rolex watch, which the psychiatrist was certain was a listening device.

By the end of the conversation, Gilbert was insisting that Bowlin help him put a contract out on Arthur Spiegel. And, Gilbert said, "I know you know the people who can get it done."

Bowlin told Gilbert that he ought to check himself into a mental hospital, because he was talking like a lunatic. The meeting concluded abruptly, and Bowlin returned to his office in a state of astonishment.

At the trial seven months later, Gilbert's lawyer, Joseph Paglino, would zero in on the fact that despite Gilbert's wild demands and Bowlin's own reply that the psychiatrist was talking like a madman, police made no effort to determine if he was crazy. Why had the police set up a sting for Gilbert, Bowlin was asked on the stand, instead of trying to get him committed?

Bowlin replied that he had not believed the psychiatrist was out of his mind. "I thought he was out of control in his emotions, in that he wanted to please a very rich fiancee," he said.

THE POLICE GOT everything else on tape, from Gilbert's solicitation of Detective Rosario to the payoff in the bank parking lot. They let the psychiatrist call all the shots, depriving him of a later claim of entrapment. It was virtually an open-and-shut case. The only question left for the jury was: Had the psychiatrist been in his right mind?

Defense attorneys usually dress up their clients for court, but Joe Paglino had the opposite strategy. Everything about Gilbert's courtroom demeanor said this was a befogged and paranoid old man. Through much of the two-week trial at the Metropolitan Justice Building in Miami, the psychiatrist sat cowering at the defense table, hiding his leathery face behind arthritic fingers. In the corridors outside Courtroom 4-10, he shuffled meekly behind his lawyer, seeming not to recognize old courthouse colleagues. Gilbert never risked undermining this impression by taking the stand himself. Paglino moved repeatedly to exclude a CBS television crew on the ground that Gilbert thought that the camera, as well as microphones dangling from the ceiling, was spying on him as part of a vast conspiracy engineered by the Democratic Party and the presiding judge, Leonard Glick, himself. The motions were denied.

The defense's chief expert witness was Syvil Marquit, a clinical psychologist who had examined Gilbert two months after his arrest. Marquit, who looked straight from Central Casting with his nearly bald pate and pointy white beard a la Freud, testified that Gilbert had suffered from "delusional paranoiac disorder." "Dr. Gilbert had certain very erroneous beliefs," Marquit said. "His mind was inflamed. His mind was not working normally. He was suffering from a serious delusion, which obsessed him, which took possession of him, which controlled him, and he was not aware that this was happening."

More specifically, Marquit said, Gilbert's paranoid delusions centered on young Adam Spiegel. Marquit conceded there was little, if any, evidence that the boy had actually been abused. But in Marquit's professional opinion, Gilbert's irrational condition had caused him to confuse Adam with a real child-abuse case the psychiatrist was consulting on. In this notorious case, a Miami woman had confessed to prostituting her three young children. Gilbert "read the confession of this woman, and he got all the gory details," Marquit said. As further evidence of Gilbert's insanity, Marquit cited the psychiatrist's claims that Becky Thacker had enemies in the Democratic Party who were meddling in her sister's custody case and taping her conversations with Rolex watches.

Marquit was an excellent witness. Speaking clearly and convincingly in lay language, he painted a vivid portrait of Gilbert as a very sick man.

But now it was the prosecution's turn. Cross-examining Marquit, Russell Killinger of the Dade County State's Attorney's office quickly zeroed in on whether Gilbert might be faking insanity. Killinger recalled the meeting with Dale Bowlin, which began with the psychiatrist in a seemingly coherent state of mind and ended with him sounding like a lunatic.

"Dale Bowlin tells the defendant, 'Doc, you're talking criminal activity, you came to the wrong person,' " Killinger said. "That's the first time Dale Bowlin rebuffs him. But the defendant doesn't stop. He goes on again and brings up his fiancee -- she's in a position to substantially reward you -- and for the second time Dale Bowlin says, 'No, I'm not going to do it.' "

Killinger paused. "Is it a fair statement," he asked Marquit, "that it was only at this point in the conversation, after twice being refused by Dale Bowlin, that the bizarre, crazy-type statements start coming out of the defendant's mouth -- about the Rolex watch?"

"Yes, it is a fair statement," Marquit replied.

Of course! Killinger was suggesting that a psychiatrist with years of experience arguing the insanity defense would inevitably realize the need, should he ever have to stand trial, to plant the evidence of his own insanity. It was an outrageous thesis, but consistent with Gilbert's reputation for mental dexterity.

THE Michael Gilbert case highlights the difficulty of proving insanity in a court of law.

Florida, like many states, uses as its insanity standard the M'Naughten test, which derived from an 1843 English court case. Under M'Naughten, two conditions must be met for a person to be ruled legally insane: first, if he suffered at the time of his crime from a mental disease or defect; second, if he did not understand the nature of his act, or, if he did understand, did not know that it was wrong.

After Syvil Marquit gave his detailed diagnosis of Gilbert, the defense produced two other experts and, following M'Naughten, asked them essentially two questions: Did the psychiatrist have a mental disease? Was he able to tell the difference between right and wrong? The answer to the first question was yes, to the second, no. Later in its rebuttal, the state called two experts of its own. Not surprisingly, they were asked the same questions, but with the opposite results.

As in many trials, the jury may have had reason to be skeptical of these experts on both sides, psychiatrists and psychologists for hire at up to $150 an hour. Often the competing experts seem to cancel each other out.

Potentially more important to the Gilbert case were a couple of nonexpert witnesses. Joseph T. Robinson, a lawyer who had represented Gilbert for years, testified that he had ended the relationship early last year after the psychiatrist became "uncontrollable." Frank Britt, one of Gilbert's neighbors from the country club, recalled the time the psychiatrist had reacted to the theft of his golf cart by driving his BMW out into the middle of the course. Another time Britt said he had found Gilbert watching television with the set upside down. Gilbert explained that he was checking it for bugs.

In the courtroom the impression was forming that Gilbert might indeed have experienced a mental deterioration. "This poor old guy here," Paglino said, wrapping his arm around Gilbert's neck, tousling his hair and shaking him like a rag doll.

For the prosecution, the difficulty was to counter the image of a deluded and pitiful old man. The state lacked evidence that Gilbert was running an elaborate con to fake his insanity. There was no smoking gun. Then Killinger produced the trial's final witness, one William Wallace.

Mystery surrounded Wallace's arrival in the courtroom. At the court's direction, he had entered through a back door so as not to be seen in the corridors; photographers had been cautioned to blur his face. It turned out Wallace was a former undercover agent for the United States Customs Service, whose identity had to be concealed because he was working with the Government in continuing investigations.

For the past five years, Wallace testified, he had run a construction and excavating company in Brevard County, 200 miles north of Miami. The company happened to be controlled by Michael Gilbert. Wallace met the psychiatrist in 1982 as a patient -- the customs agent had become "extremely violent," he said, because of his work pursuing drug traffickers throughout the Caribbean.

Gilbert, Wallace testified, cured him of the violent tendencies that were ruining his life. After helping him to quit the Customs Service, Gilbert hired Wallace to operate his upstate business. In fact, Gilbert virtually adopted Wallace as the son he never had.

Wallace said that on three occasions last August, Gilbert asked him for help with his Arthur Spiegel problem. The psychiatrist suggested everything from framing Spiegel on a drug charge to running him over with a dump truck. Gilbert added that in her gratitude Becky Thacker would take care of Wallace financially.

In the courtroom there was a sharp intake of breath. This was new and unexpected testimony, unreported in the newspapers or in pretrial depositions. The conversations with Wallace had taken place before Gilbert approached Dale Bowlin.

Wallace testified that he'd turned down Gilbert all three times. "Basically, I suggested to Dr. Gilbert that he think very long and hard about doing anything like that," he said. "I thought the possibility existed that Rebecca Thacker was probably trying to manipulate and use him."

The witness related how he had met Thacker in 1989, when she and her friend Cecil Heftel, the former Representative, had visited Florida to consider buying a trailer park owned by Gilbert. Soon negotiations escalated to the point where Thacker and Heftel were talking of buying out all the psychiatrist's properties in Brevard County -- a deal worth millions.

But Wallace doubted the good faith of the buyers because of an earlier real-estate deal that Thacker had backed out of and that had ended in a dispute between the two parties. "It was my opinion she had tried to take Dr. Gilbert for everything he was worth," he said. "It was as clear as the water in this cup."

The portrait of Gilbert that Wallace was painting was hardly that of a man whose mind was slipping or whose reason was failing. On the contrary, Wallace testified, in the months after the psychiatrist's arrest, Gilbert continued to meet regularly with him to discuss real-estate deals. The get-togethers continued even into early October, at which point Gilbert had already checked into Larkin Institute, the Miami mental hospital where he began seeing the experts who would later be his insanity witnesses.

One day, Wallace related, he was standing with Gilbert on a balcony of the psychiatric ward and asked him how he planned to defend himself in court. Gilbert replied that he would use a "psychiatric defense" that would turn on the claim that at the time he was trying to help young Adam Spiegel, he was reviewing another case whose details were chilling beyond belief. "It was a situation in which any psychiatrist would be able to say, 'Yes, this is something that could alter this man's thinking,' " Gilbert told Wallace.

It was an astonishing revelation. The psychiatrist had essentially given Wallace a preview of the testimony that Syvil Marquit would later deliver to explain the origin of his "paranoid delusions." Yet this meeting with Wallace in the mental hospital was on Oct. 3 -- three weeks before Marquit would examine Gilbert for the first time. In other words, Gilbert had already formulated exactly what Marquit's diagnosis was going to be -- a diagnosis necessary to an insanity defense.

Wallace's startling testimony turned out to be the final piece the prosecution needed. After only a single afternoon of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on a count of bribing Detective Rosario. On the other count, of bribing Dale Bowlin -- where no money had changed hands and no incriminating recordings were made -- the jury voted to acquit.

In the end, the woman Gilbert apparently risked everything for may never have intended to requite his romantic interest. One interesting item that emerged during the trial was the huge bill that Rebecca Thacker ran up during her monthlong stay at the Hyatt Regency last August. The bill showed she'd been joined for part of her stay by another of her pursuers, an English engineer named Colin Fuller. The entire $15,000 bill, including $2,000 in limousine rentals, had been paid by Cecil Heftel. (Heftel, who denies any romantic link to Thacker, says the payment was a loan.)

On Aug. 31, three days after Gilbert's arrest, the Spiegel custody case was heard in Miami family court. The court found "no imminent danger" to Adam and instructed the parents to continue joint custody, with liberal visiting rights for the father. Becky Thacker checked out of the Hyatt Regency the following day and apparently cut off contact with Gilbert.

As for the psychiatrist, he was sentenced on April 30 to 364 days in jail, to be followed by 18 months of house arrest and 500 hours of community service. An appeal is pending. Afterward -- after his release, if he is required to serve his time -- it's conceivable that the psychiatrist may one day again testify as an insanity expert.

In the courthouse parking lot after his client's conviction, Paglino said: "Oh well. The jury didn't find him insane. Now he can practice psychiatry again."

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A version of this article appears in print on May 12, 1991, on Page 6006036 of the National edition with the headline: The Psychiatrist Who Pleaded Insanity. Today's Paper|Subscribe